Expect the World, Through an Aesthetic Prism

Jeremy Deller at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

From “The Battle of Orgreave” (2001), part of the Jeremy Deller exhibition in Philadelphia.Credit
Martin Jenkinson/Courtesy of Jeremy Deller

PHILADELPHIA — The British artist Jeremy Deller, the subject of a thought-provoking exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art here, is the anti-Damien Hirst. Born in 1966, he came of age during the surge of the Young British Artists, when Mr. Hirst, Chris Ofili, the Chapman brothers, Tracey Emin and like-minded artists were producing extravagantly provocative works that the mega-collector Charles Saatchi acquired in bulk and packaged in the exhibition “Sensation,” which greatly offended Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani when it came to the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.

Mr. Deller, who opted out of studio art school in favor of studying art history, chose a less attention-getting approach. In 1993 he had his first solo exhibition, “Open Bedroom,” in his own bedroom in the house where he lived with his parents, who were on vacation and didn’t know about it. About 20 people saw it. In documentary photographs and a cleaned-up replication of it at the Institute it resembles a bright but otherwise ordinary teenager’s lair with paintings on the walls, rock music posters and poetic touches like the words “Every day I look at the world from my window” applied in neat block letters to a window overlooking rooftops and chimneys.

Mr. Deller would go on to fashion a Turner Prize-winning career devoted to breaking down traditional walls between art and the larger world. Rather than producing visually arresting objects for sale in antiseptic galleries, he would, for example, place curious signs in public places, like one reading “Brian Epstein Died for You” attached to a sidewalk pole, suggesting that the Beatles’ genius manager was a rock ’n’ roll martyr.

Since most of what Mr. Deller has created over the past two decades has not been gallery-type art, a museum retrospective brings up some philosophical problems. (This show was organized by Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery, London.) A large amount of the Institute’s space is occupied by a homely snack stand under fabric banners hung from the ceiling. As a rough video shows, the snack stand rode on a truck as one of many floats in a full-scale parade with marching bands and beauty queens in fancy cars, which Mr. Deller orchestrated in Manchester in 2009. The banners, including a red-and-gold one proclaiming “Joy in People,” were carried by participants. Here you may enjoy a free cup of tea at the snack stand, but much is lost in presenting artifacts of an event that seems to have been fun for its participants and witnesses.

Photo

From “Joy in People,” part of the Jeremy Deller exhibition in Philadelphia.Credit
Linda Nylind/Courtesy of Jeremy Deller

The question is not whether a parade can be art — what the heck, why not? — but how to regard its remnants and documentation, which, after all, are not very exciting in the immediate gallery experience. Such concerns do not arise with films Mr. Deller has made like “Our Hobby Is Depeche Mode” (2006), an entertaining documentary about devout fans of that band in Eastern and Western Europe and North and South America.

But questions about event-based art arise with some urgency in the case of Mr. Deller’s best-known work, “The Battle of Orgreave,” from 2001. For this project he organized a historical re-enactment of a violent conflict that resulted in the crushing of a coal miners’ strike by police in Orgreave, in South Yorkshire, in 1984. Mr. Deller enlisted 800 historical re-enactors and 200 former miners who were involved in the melee to stage what he has described as “a thousand-person crime re-enactment.”

An hourlong film by the director Mike Figgis documenting the project includes interviews with former miners, police officers and witnesses, old news clips, rehearsals and scenes of the re-enactment itself. At the Institute the movie is being shown in a dark room next to a gallery displaying extensive information about the busting of the strike. A timeline, copies of newspapers and books for visitors to browse will help Americans understand what was at stake politically in faraway Thatcher-era England.

While it is all compelling, a certain puzzlement ensues. Are we to regard the film as a work of art in its own right? Or do we view it as documentation of an artwork that only people who were there as participants and observers actually experienced? Perhaps a holistic perspective is called for: that is, to view everything — from Mr. Deller’s initial research to the broadcasting of the film on British television and the nationwide discussions it generated — as the artwork. We might think of the art as dispersed through time and space, affecting people with varying degrees of intensity now and then and here and there.

This idea is, of course, far from the traditional conception of the artwork as a singular object, but it is in line with the notion of art as an expander of consciousness by any means, which dates back to the salad days of Dada. That brings to mind the perhaps surprising thought that Mr. Deller and artists of the relational aesthetics movement with whom he is routinely identified share something central with Mr. Hirst: a sense of crisis around the question of what art can be for, in a time when all its traditional philosophical supports seem to have collapsed.

Mr. Hirst’s way has been to push the conventional system of art display and distribution to the breaking point, as in his simultaneous presentation of spot paintings in 11 Gagosian galleries worldwide last year, which pressed people to contemplate the death of art under the deadly reign of capitalism. Mr. Deller answers with a life-affirming, hippielike invitation: Exit the compartmentalizing, money-driven system. Be a part of it all. Only a hidebound curmudgeon could argue with that.

“Jeremy Deller: Joy in People” is on view through Dec. 30 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia; (215) 898-7108, icaphila.org.

A version of this review appears in print on September 28, 2012, on page C30 of the New York edition with the headline: Expect the World, Through an Aesthetic Prism. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe